Data Mining in the Humanities
Mar 1, 2022 • 1 min read

Blog Post#2: Text Encoding

What I Learned About Text Encoding

The aim of the approach demonstrated in this Byrne Seminar lab, about text encoding, was to teach us how to use text encoding of course. Surprising, I know. This lab taught me how to do text encoding with TEI-XML. As you read through this, I will demonstrate Many of the things I learned about utilizing text encoding. Some of the many things I noticed with this program were as follows:

  1. TEI-XML is very similar to HTML, something I’m partially familiar with
  2. It is very easy to interpret what will be rendered in post
  3. Since this is done in VSCode (at least for this lab), It becomes very easy to follow

I found the general process of creating things in markdown and TEI-XML interesting, alongside the Markdown language that this blogpost is being written in.

I found the markdown guide linked to the class to be very helpful in figuring out how md works. TEI-XML was a bit more confusing, so I decided to not mess around with it too much.

Oftentimes, with TEI-XML, the formatting of the message would mess up, leaving me with something like this [TEI-XML messing up]

If it isn’t already apparent I gave up on trying to make that work.

The image I was trying to render can be seen here

As for more failiures, you can deem me attempting to embed an image into markdown text also a failure, and I was able to work around it by using the lazy method of linking the image via image hosting. What the image itself shows is that I really do not understand how markdown works fully, but I know enough to use some worse work arounds.

I have no idea how my findings related to the readings. Honestly, the only connection I made during the entire project was that this class is happening at Rutgers, and we are doing archival work related to previous Rutgers students from around a century ago.

Guest post by: aar234